Once you’ve built a good-enough battery under painstaking lab conditions, how do you build millions of them quickly?
have wondered what to do with the liquid inside a lithium-ion battery. This electrolyte is key to how batteries work, shuttling ions from one end of the cell to the other. But it’s also cumbersome, adding weight and bulk that limit how far electric vehicles can go on a charge—on top of which, it can catch fire when a battery shorts. A perfect fix would be replacing that liquid with a solid—ideally one that’s light and airy.
In recent weeks, Solid Power, among the more lavishly funded of those solid-state companies, has fired up a pilot line in Colorado that it hopes will address that question. At full capacity, it will produce 300 cells per week, or about 15,000 per year. That’s a trickle compared with the millions of cells produced each year by gigafactories, and getting there will still take months of finessing tools and processes.
In principle, that makes sense. A battery is a battery. Like their liquid-filled cousins, solid-state batteries require, a cathode, and some way for ions to migrate between the two. That’s where the electrolyte comes in. But it’s not easy to make something that’s porous to ions, yet solid enough not to crack. Researchers have spent years looking for the right materials, eventually settling on a range of ideas that include ceramics and plasticky polymers. But not all of them are easy to make.
Lithium offers other kinds of trouble. Over time, and especially when the battery is forced to charge up fast, lithium ions can form dendrites—tendrils of metal that wind their way between the electrodes and eventually cause the battery to short. It sounds scary—and in an old-school lithium-ion battery it could be a recipe for a fire. But in lab tests of solid-state batteries, it hasn’t proven dangerous because the solid electrolyte isn’t flammable.
Canada Latest News, Canada Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Tronsmart’s New AirPod-Style Earbuds Are A Solid BargainThe Tronsmart Onyx Ace Pro are a great pair of budget true wireless earbuds that cost less than $40 but sound two or three times that price.
Read more »
More job gains point to a solid economy and Fed rate hikesU.S. employers added 390,000 jobs in May, extending a streak of solid hiring that has bolstered an economy under pressure from high inflation and rising interest rates.
Read more »
'Outsider' in Nevada’s GOP Senate primary surges, rattling Trump's pickRetired Army Capt. Sam Brown, an underdog in Nevada’s GOP Senate primary, has tightened the race against Adam Laxalt, a longtime polling favorite who Trump endorsed, with less than two weeks before the election.
Read more »
‘Crypto Continent’: The rise of African blockchain startups“Markets are evolving rapidly, and nowhere more so than in Africa,” says Gideon Greaves from Swiss investment firm CV VC, which launched a $50 million fund to support 100 African blockchain startups over the next four years
Read more »
Walmart says it will create more than 4,000 jobs with new, high-tech fulfillment centersTo better tackle the challenges of e-commerce, Walmart says it’s building four next-generation fulfillment centers, creating more than 4,000 new jobs.
Read more »
How Not To Short-Circuit the Clean Energy Transition (Video)One such challenge to wind and solar is making sure the grid is protected if there is a fault, such as a short circuit.
Read more »